Bookish Thoughts

I started reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman toward the end of high school and built up my collection over the first few years of college.  But it took me a bit longer to get around to the spin-offs.  With Death: The Time of Your Life , I finally managed to finish this collection.  There's a nice sense of completion that comes with that. This graphic novel picks up with Foxglove and Hazel, who were first introduced in A Game of You .  They lived upstairs from Barbie, the central character in that arc. Though Foxglove previously appeared off-page in the first arc, Preludes and Nocturnes , when her ex-girlfriend calls her in an attempt to get back together. In A Game of You , Hazel discovers she is pregnant, which she's a bit amazed by.  Yes, she had sex with a man, but she was told that if you do it standing up, you can't get pregnant.  Hazel's not the brightest person. Foxglove agrees to stay with her and try to work things out, though. Death: The...

Children of God  is the sequel to Mary Doria Russell's debut novel, The Sparrow .  In The Sparrow  mankind discovered intelligent life on Rakhat, a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and launched a mission to go and study the life there. Children of God  deals with the aftermath of that mission, which sparked a revolution on Rakhat. There are two sentient species living on Rakhat, one carnivorous (the Jana'ata) and one herbivorous (the Runa). The Jana'ata used the Runa for everything, from labor to food.  They controlled when they could breed and who they could breed with.  They also monitored they're own population quite closely, at roughly 4% of the Runa population. Of course, when the humans learned about these strict breeding policies, they were appalled.  And they incited the Runa to revolution. Children of God  follows the aftermath of this.  How the revolution plays out and what it's consequences are. Parallel to th...

I love Good Omens , which was written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman early in both of their careers.  It's my favorite book.  I discovered Good Omens in college, and I've read it at least once a year since then.  Every now and then I just get in the mood to go revisit Crowley, Aziraphale, Anathema Device, Newton Pulsifer, Adam, and all the rest.  This book remains entertaining and laugh out loud funny no matter how many times I read it. This post is more of a love letter/recap than a review and will contain intense spoilers.  What follows is everything I love most about this book.. Good Omens begins nearly at the beginning of everything: It was a nice day. All the days had been nice.  There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet. So, that's pretty close to the beginning.  It actually starts as Adam and a newly pregnant Eve are looking for shelter having just been kicked out of the Gard...

The Sparrow  is about humanity's first encounter with extraterrestrial life. The Sparrow  is about the meeting, blending, and clashing of two cultures. The Sparrow  is about the frontier spirit that pushes us to always explore. The Sparrow  is about a group of people coming together to form a family. The Sparrow  is about one man's struggle to find God, and his despair at what he finds. The Sparrow  is about tragedies that result from miscommunication. The Sparrow  is about sacrifice and love. The Sparrow  is a rich, important book, and you should read it. In the year 2019, humanity discovers intelligent life on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. While the UN is arguing over whether it's worth sending people to a planet over 4 lightyears away, the Vatican quickly and privately pulls it's own mission together.  And so four Jesuit priests, a physician, an engineer, an astronomer, and a computer scientist embark on an a...

Yesterday morning twitter informed me that it was Free Comic Book day.  I immediately followed the link to find a participating comic book store nearby and went off to collect my free comic book.  Well, I didn't end up getting a free comic book; most of the selection was aimed at kids.  But I did get my hands on Frank Miller's Batman: Year One  and I rounded out my Sandman  collection with Death: The High Cost of Living . Batman: Year One  was published in 1986 as part of DC's effort to reimagine some of its superheros and introduce them to a new generation.  I don't think this book does much to alter Batman's origin story, but it adds some detail. Honestly, it's interesting to start thinking about the major superheroes.  They're all familiar, but the details of the stories differ over the years.  Bruce Wayne became Batman in 1939, in 1986, and in 2005.  I'm sure there were variations on his origin story told multiple...

How do I even being to review The Book Thief ?  I've been reading it at a pace of about two chapters a day with the Mark Reads project.  Mark Oshiro, who runs the blog, reads and reviews books a chapter at a time.  The Book Thief has incredibly short chapters, hence the accelerated reading speed.  He's already read the entire Twilight saga, the Harry Potter series, The Hunger Game s trilogy, and is now finishing up The Book Thief .  Next he starts on His Dark Materials , followed by The Lord of the Rings .  He's also working his way through Infinite Jest , which I gave up on pretty quickly, but may eventually revisit.  Reading these books along with him is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it. He also runs a sibling site called Mark Watches , in which he does the same thing with episodes of television shows.  Past projects include Firefly and Doctor Who , the current project is Avatar: The Last Airbender , and the announced future projec...

Wow. I doubt I could ever do what Joe Simpson does over the pages of this book. While climbing the 20,000+ foot tall Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, Joe Simpson falls and breaks his leg.  He and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, work out a system that gets them most of the way down the mountain in 300 foot intervals. But as they near the base of the mountain, Yates is forced to cut the rope in order to save is own life. Simpson falls 100 feet and miraculously lands on a ledge about 50 feet down a crevasse.  The crevasse looks bottomless, and Yates has no reason to believe that Joe survived the fall, so he returns to camp alone. Somehow, Simpson finds the strength to climb, slide, hop, and crawl his way back to camp over the next several days.  I read the book, and I'm still not sure how he did it.  It's sheer force of will that keeps him going. What Simpson goes through is horrifying.  He hallucinates and nearly succumbs to madness se...